It is known

Looks like after Thor, The Avengers, and Thor: The Dark World, Loki will be taking a break. That’s according to Joss Whedon, who mentioned in a podcast interview with Empire that the character will not be in the Avengers and then proceeded to talk about euphemisms for female anatomy.

It makes sense in context, I swear.

The issue came up when one of the interviewers, a big fan of Whedon sneaking the word “quim” into The Avengers, asked whether he’d “been able to unearth an olde english word that can rival ‘quim’ for Avengers 2?” Whedon then responded:

“Everyone is going to be looking for the Loki-Hulk smash moment and you’ll be looking for [a quim moment]. First of all, imitating what I did before is the surest way to do it not as well. Second of all, Loki’s not there to say those terrible things. Although I do think we should bring the word back. Not as an insult, it’s just a nice word. There aren’t a lot of nice words for it. The ones in common usage are either like sort of offensive, or just sort of lame… it’s just not good. Quim! What a lovely word for a lovely thing.”

Holy conversational whiplash, Batman! My brain’s having a hard time knowing what part of that response to focus on.

He also had some things to say about Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, starting with the fact that they’re “going to be dope” and that the duo is:

“very, very close to my heart, because they were Avengers the whole time I was reading the books as a kid. Sometimes they were evil, sometimes they were good. They were very textured, very different than everybody else in the mix.”

He continued with a vague statement about their relationship to the Avengers that might be considered a bit spoilery, so I’m hiding it. In response to a comment from the interviewer that the Avengers “are kind of becoming a family, and then you’ll have another… sub-trope within the group,” Whedon remarked: “Mm-hmm. Or without. They’re not there to make things easier for the Avengers. But yeah, what do we do with a group once we’ve got them? Squeeze… and the fun that I’m having doing that is probably unseemly.”

Makes sense. You have a group that’s been through at least one huge, world-threatening event together; if you throw some newbs into the mix there’s bound to be conflict. But what if that conflict is more than the normal getting-to-know-you stuff the Avengers themselves went through? Is it 2015 yet?